Over half of US smartphone subscribers use Android

Beancounters working for market researchers Comscore have worked out that Android has continued to grow its smartphone marketshare, accounting for 51 percent of smartphone subscribers in the USA.

Apple is on 30 percent of all smartphones, according to data from the Comscore MobiLens service. Research in Motion ranked third, with 12.3 percent share, followed by Microsoft with 3.9 percent and Symbian at 1.4 percent.

The Comscore report is based on a survey of more than 30,000 US mobile subscribers.

Samsung was the top handset manufacturer overall, with 26.0 percent market share, which is an increase of 0.7 percentage points. LG was next with a 19.3 percent share. Apple continued to gain share in the OEM market, ranking third with 14 percent of mobile subscribers which was up 1.6 percentage points. Motorola had 12.8 percent and HTC with six percent.

The survey estimates that more than 106 million people in the United States owned a smartphone during the three months ending in March. This is a nine percent increase from December.

The Comscore report said that while Apple and Android may be dominating the market, another study found their customer bases use the phones differently.

iPhones tend to connect to the internet via Wi-Fi more than Android phones. While 71 percent of all iPhones used both mobile and Wi-Fi networks to connect to the Internet, only 32 percent of unique Android mobile phones used both types of connections.

Apparently the figures are the same in the UK where 87 percent of iPhones used both mobile and WiFi networks for web access, compared with 57 percent of Android phones.